They're getting paid in extremely overvalued stock, so maybe it balances out.

This is not really a diss on SpaceX either because a lot of IPOs go through an immediate pop and then 1-2 years of doldrums as lockouts expire and promises aren't quite delivered.

Nobody knows what 60 billion in SpaceX stock today will be worth when Cursor insiders finally get to sell (at least a year from now, after other SpaceX insiders have started selling).

Moat is whatever thing is stopping the next guy from simply drinking your milkshake. People conflate "I could smash this out in a weekend" with "and therefore could also build a multi-billion dollar revenue stream in [counted in months]".

No, look a Composoer 2, it stands out starkly on its own in the pareto frontier on low cast and fast models.

Composer 2.5 was a huge leap with minimal compute from xAI.

They can compete with OpenAI and anthropic with xAI scale compute. They have a top notch model team and incredible training data and huge enterprise costumer contracts.

It doesn’t tell anything about the valuation, but I prefer it over Claude Code, and I even stopped using JetBrains IDEs because of it.

Vs Claude Code: I like the option to change the models, as I often prefer ChatGPT or Composer to Opus. I have a slight preference towards TUI, but not so strong to drop the models.

Vs JetBrains. I really love JetBrains but the tab complete just works so well for me.

its not just the models, their auto complete is actually really good. when you make a change it will give you "tab to next" which makes refactors super easy.

composer 2.5 is also a very decent model, it go 90% of my AI tasks using it now.

Could not say on the valuation front. The one thing that is obvious is the trash talkers love to point out how horrible it is but I have yet to find a compelling replacement. Obviously Claude Code works but at least for me I never got along with the CLI workflow very well and sure I could use vs code with the extension for Claude but then I lose tab autocompletes which I actually like. I have yet to see anyone build a derivative model like composer 2 that is quick, cheap and has higher reliability on tool call use. Again I don’t know on valuation but it’s pretty impressive how far they have come. I look at Jetbrains and at least from an AI perspective they have been left in the dust.

Cursor was nice when I was still meticulously hand coding my stack, fantastic autocomplete. With today's top models, I barely write code myself, just review commits. Cursor eats Opus credits like there is no tomorrow. Composer has been a net negative in my experience. All in on Codex with GPT 5.5 on high using /fast.

Cursor, from my companies perspective at least, seems to be handling charming leadership to get enterprise AI contracts in place, compared to the alternatives. That's feeling like the moat from my first-hand experience. Easy single contract that covers a lot of AI cases that management wants to say they have in place.

Cursor's moat is that it is a virus that infects organizations through shared skills, hooks, agents, etc.. Once one person uses it and infects the repo everyone else starts using it.

I don't. Cursor being a man in the middle between coders and other people models for so long, has so much more training data than anyone else in the world.

Yes. I think Cursor is overvalued, but not to the extent of SpaceX

In terms of whether they’re overvalued: probably. But any valuation should also take into account the value they have to x.ai (also under SpaceX) as a source of training data for coding models.

I do think this has had its day. From what I remember, Cursor was useful back in the day when you coded in an IDE and wanted to read code while you baby stepped through incremental changes with an AI. I'm tempted to put /sarc around this but not really...

I like Cursor but that valuation is a hard sell.

Their valuation should be very closely tied to how how many tokens it takes to get from Void to Cursor.

If those values diverge by much, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

They have a surprising amount of enterprise revenue and mindshare, of which xAI has literally none.

Cursor Remote Agents are important to our AI orchestration layer. It's possible that Claude can do this directly but Cursor Remote Agents made this laughably easy.

Composer is very good, and these days after heavily using CC, Pi and Open code I am back with Cursor. "No moat or IP" is underrating it a lot.

they propably have a lot of training data from their users, which might be useful for SpaceX which has a lot of compute

It's not true it has zero moat or IP (they have their own LLM and it is useful), but it is indeed way over-valued.

obivously is overvalued

Every single one?

There's a plausible synergy in it for xAI though. Access to reams of training data for a company whose marginal cost of compute is very very low, and that they can use as a channel to push Grok. I don't think it's worth anywhere near this much to anyone else, but to xAI it's at least possible.

I guess they're getting bought because they had access to a lot of codebases from a lot of companies, and perhaps there's something to mine in those logs...

They have the conversation history of every person that has used their product. That's worth something.

Sounds like what people here said 20 years ago about Google buying YouTube, or 10 years ago about Facebook buying Instagram - companies with no moats and huge infrastructure costs.

To paraphrase, the biggest trick the devil pulled is convincing founders they need a moat.

None of that really matters.

What matters is that this has enough "future story value" to keep the few investors invested... allowing for the planned index funds to buy into the overvalued stock & allowing for the largest heist in the history of money.

It's become pure hype and drama on the global stock market stage.

Grok needs a coding environment play to match Claude Code - that's what this is.

And AI companies are not short of capital.

So is 'Space'X. They fit perfectly